Tag Archives: internet

Making collaborative work work – Is “social business” necessary for collaboration? No – ALL business is collaborative. But three simple “social” principles can make collaboration in your business BETTER. Simple in principle, that is … execution is the trick. You’ll see what I mean when you read the post!

Why Connect.me? – My piece on connect.me, a site which tackles the thorny issue of trust on the internet. If you know someone, or something about them, you can vouch for them on that topic. Over time, and multiple vouches, a reputation can be made evident, and trust can be built. My point is that trust is one of three things that needs to be in place before we see the missing 90% of the internet’s potential. The other two? Read on …

But are they working hard? – A look at the problems managers get themselves into when they concentrate on inputs (hours worked, “busyness”) rather than outputs (actual results); and when they try and attribute team results to individuals … most performance reviews completely ignore that individual achievements in a business context are extremely rare – most, if not all, results are a collective effort.

Edging toward the fully licensed world – So who owns what on the Internet? Doc Searls looks at why we need to think now about what sort of “ownership” we want for the Internet, before corporations turn it into a shopping strip, and we lose the freedoms that make the Internet valuable. SOPA, PIPA and ACTA are just the tip of the iceberg

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Knock, knock, it’s the future (Building 59) – What’s behind SOPA/PIPA is a small group of large businesses whose business model is disappearing. Like Kodak, they are trying to ignore the future. Like Kodak, they may find that it is an exercise in futility and the road to failure …

A New Style of Work – This is not only pretty much how I work these days, it’s also the future for more and more of us. As conventional “careers” disappear into organisational restructures, those who can will trend towards the “distributed” working style. When you get there, give me a call – there’s a few of you I’d be happy to work with again

How Pursuit of Profits Kills Innovation and the U.S. Economy – … or any other economy for that matter. So outsourcing makes you profitable – what happens when somebody else does everything for your business? What reason do you have for it existing? This is one of the insidious results of a fascination with economic profit to the exclusion of other types of value, and also of only using percentage-type measures. Making your customers’ lives better will keep you in business longer and better than just chasing internally-focussed profit measure.

The Rise of Developeronomics – Know any good software developers? Invest in them. Whether you realise it or not, your company is a software company, regardless of what you are making as a product. And those tame developers you have?: “In most non-software companies, developers have so far accepted a sort of second-class-citizen status despite their increasing scarcity and increasingly critical roles. That is about to change.” Developers – the new kingmakers …

The City Solution – How to handle a rising population? Urbanise … National Geographic on the benefits of big cities

Don’t Break the Internet – Stanford Law Review – A reasoned view of the dangers inherent in SOPA and PROTECT-IP which also points out the irony of the USA taking censorship on the internet further than the repressive regimes it has criticised in the past

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Refuse to be Terrorized – This post is nearly five years old … have we learnt anything yet? The object of terrorism is causing fear, and our governments and press do a better job of it than most terrorists. Yes, it’s a risk … but it’s a tiny portion of the risk we face every day, so let’s get a reasonable perspective on it.

Rebecca MacKinnon: Let’s take back the Internet! – In this TEDGlobal talk from Edinburgh July 2011, the intermediary role the Internet plays between people and their governments is explored, with some warning that we as yet haven’t had the Internet’s “Magna Carta” moment, and we don’t yet run the Internet with the “consent of the networked”. We’re missing the political mechanisms that would ensure that governments and technology work for the benefit of the public on the web.

after decades of making our supply chains efficient via reduction of supply partnerships, deeper trust-based relationships with possibly many more partners will lead to greater agility and specialisation.

large companies are still necessary where there are large infrastructure requirements, but many small companies will be able to flexibly scale via loosely-coupled partnerships brokered over the internet

the next decade will see increasing pressure on companies that maintain an industrial-age business model that emphasises efficiency over effectiveness and agility

Why a Rise in M.B.A.s Coincided with the Fall of American Industry – What happens when senior management becomes more and more abstracted from the business’ product(s). In the end people deal with the things they are most comfortable with, and ultimately MBAs deal with finances and organisational structures … not the product; so the product suffers. When that happens, all the case studies in the world can’t help you. Who is more interested in products? Engineers …

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A Customer Liberation Manifesto (PDF) – A bit of a meaty read, but has some interesting points to make about how how we should (and probably don’t) treat customers. It contrasts the familiar customer relationship management idea (CRM) with “customer manages the relationship” (CMR) – noting that most CRM activity isn’t REALLY designed to help the relationship, but to maximise the vendor’s profitable exploitation of that relationship. That’s not customer service …

And who knew there was such a thing as “service science”?

Our Time Is Not Our Own: Time Is The New Space – If you’re in a job that is measured by results, but you’re being judged by time, you’re probably in the wrong place. Most “knowledge work” (an increasing percentage of all jobs) succeeds when a particular set of outcomes is achieved – which may have very little to do with where and how you spend your “working” time, rather than some repetitive machine-like activity between 9am and 5pm.

Wikipedia And The Death Of The Expert – How does the Internet change the way we learn? Is expertise dead? Or do we just view it and use it differently these days? Knowledge is being recognised as provisional, not final; and reached via polylogue rather than decree.

The Pull of Narrative – In Search of Persistent Context – In a world of accelerating information flow, abbreviated communications and increasing content choices, persistent narratives which provide context are becoming more important as a means to finding sense in the noise. This post also touches on the importance of finding new narratives, rather than reverting to old but comfortable ones like fundamentalism and nationalism, the divisive effects of which will also be amplified.

A Hippocratic oath for the internet – An impassioned plea from Jeff Jarvis to the eG8 summit called by Sarkozy (seemingly an attempt to strengthen government control over the internet; more of a pandering to old business models; neither aim is particularly good for citizens) to stay away from the internet. As Jarvis says: “Sarkozy called this meeting to discuss the growth of the internet. It will grow only if it is open and free.”

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